Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [84]
“Kitty-kitty?” Ian called.
He stepped outside, shutting the screen door behind him. Yes, it was definitely a cat. When he approached, it teetered on the brink of leaving but finally stood its ground. He bent to pat its head. He could feel the narrow skull beneath fur so soft that it made almost no impression on his fingertips.
“Where’s your owner, little cat?” he asked.
But he thought he knew the answer to that. There wasn’t any tag or collar, and when he ran a hand down its body he could count the ribs. It staggered weakly beneath his touch, then braced itself and started purring in a rusty, unpracticed way, pressing its small face into the cup of his palm.
As it happened, the Bedloes had no pets at that particular moment. They had never replaced Beastie, and the latest of their cats had disappeared a few months ago. So this new little cat had come to the right people. Ian let it spend a few minutes getting used to him, and then he picked it up and carried it back inside the house. It clung to him with needle claws, tense but still conscientiously purring. “See what I found in the alley,” he told the children.
“Oh, look!” Daphne cried, slipping out of her chair. “Can I hold it, Ian? Can I keep it?”
“If no one comes to claim it,” Ian said, handing it over.
In the light he saw that the cat was black from head to foot, and not much more than half grown. Its eyes had changed to green already but its face was still the triangular, top-heavy face of a kitten. Thomas was lifting its spindly tail to see what sex it was, but the cat objected to that and climbed higher on Daphne’s shoulder. “Ouch!” Daphne squawked. “Thomas, quit! See what you made it do?”
“It’s a girl, I think,” Thomas announced.
“Leave her alone, Thomas!”
“She’s not just yours, Daphne,” Agatha said. She had risen too and was scratching the cat behind its ears.
“She is so mine! Ian said so! You’re mine, mine, mine, you little sweetums,” Daphne said, nuzzling the cat’s nose with her own. “Oh, what kind of monstrous, mean person would just ditch you and drive off?”
All of a sudden Ian had an image of Agatha, Thomas, and Daphne huddled in a ditch by the side of a road. They were hanging onto each other and their eyes were wide and fearful. And far in the distance, almost out of sight, Ian’s car was vanishing around a curve.
But then immediately afterward, he felt such a deep sense of loss that it made his breath catch.
His mother was truly disabled now. Oh, she still hobbled from room to room, she still insisted on standing over the stove and creeping behind the dust mop, but the arthritis had seized up her hands and the finer motions of day-to-day life were beyond her. Folding the laundry, driving the car, buttoning Daphne’s dress down the back—all that was left to Ian and his father. And Ian’s father was not much help. Any task he began seemed to end in, “How the dickens …?” and “Ian, can you come here a minute?” In the old days Claudia had stopped by once or twice a week to see what needed doing, but she had moved to Pittsburgh when Macy found a better job; and first they’d returned for holidays but now they didn’t even do that very often.
Meanwhile, these children were a full-time occupation. They were good children, bright children; they did well in school and never got in serious trouble. But even nonserious trouble could consume a great deal of energy, Ian had learned. Agatha, for instance, was suffering all the miseries of adolescence. Every morning she set off for school alone and friendless—the earnest, pale, studious kind of girl Ian had ignored when he himself was her age, but now he cursed those callow high-school kids who couldn’t see how special she was, how intelligent and witty and perceptive. Thomas, on the other hand, had too many friends. Tall and graceful, his voice already cracking and a shadow darkening his upper lip, he was more interested in socializing than in school-work, and one or another of the Bedloes was always having to attend parent-teacher conferences—most often Ian, it seemed.
As for Daphne, she